However, there is a scarcity of knowledge that explores how patients themselves experience the phenomenon and outcomes of non-conveyance. This is despite increasing recognition that better understanding of patient experience is associated with quality, safe, and effective healthcare, and can be beneficial to guiding health policy. Including patients in research provides important insight from the perspective of those who are the recipients of healthcare. This perspective can provide new knowledge to inform paramedic practice and education, as well as novel designs of emergency health service models of care.

This is an outcome that differs from the traditionally expected concept that ambulance services attend acute medical emergencies in the community and transport patients to an ED for further assessment, and if necessary, treatment. From a health system perspective, responses that result in non-conveyance represent a considerable use of emergency ambulance service resources. Non-conveyance episodes also represent the provision of healthcare and complex decision-making by paramedics that may subsequently contribute to a reduction in avoidable presentations to EDs.

Previous literature exploring the topic of non-conveyance has investigated whether paramedics have the ability to make safe decisions when selecting which patients are suitable to not convey to ED. Often, variables used as measures of risk included mortality rates, re-presentation rates to emergency services, or subjective interpretation of the ability of paramedics to make appropriate non-conveyance decisions.

This PhD project explored the patient experience of non-conveyance in an Australian jurisdictional ambulance service (JAS) setting. Non-conveyance is defined as a situation where an individual has received a response from an emergency ambulance service and paramedic-led healthcare, that results in a decision for the person to not be transported to a hospital emergency department (ED).